{"id":13712,"date":"2020-11-06T13:51:02","date_gmt":"2020-11-06T17:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/?p=13712"},"modified":"2020-11-06T13:51:02","modified_gmt":"2020-11-06T17:51:02","slug":"tuesday-is-finally-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2020\/11\/tuesday-is-finally-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday is Finally Over"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I still didn\u2019t feel very well.<\/p>\n

I was sitting up awake on the third night, the third long dark night of a neverending Tuesday that started on Election Day. We all knew it would take this long, but it was still agony to live through it.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have to tell anybody this. You were all there with me. I don\u2019t think anyone in America had a very good night\u2019s sleep, regardless of your political views.<\/p>\n

Trump had come on television with a sputtering tirade so shameless, even his usual enablers cut away. The news media that would\u2019ve found a way to \u201cboth sides\u201d the issue 5 years ago didn\u2019t last more than five minutes before going back to their regularly scheduled programming. Of course his disciples believed him. I don\u2019t think we can sway those people.<\/p>\n

And there are an awful lot of those people.<\/p>\n

I live in a country where nearly seventy million adults looked at the pandemonium of the last four years and decided they wanted more of that, rather than something else. That\u2019s not something that\u2019s going to go away.<\/p>\n

The tirade had aired at 6:30 Eastern, which seemed late at night because of the time change and because of how tired I was. After that, we went back to watching the vote counters.<\/p>\n

We watched and mocked the video of Trump\u2019s ridiculous spiritual advisor babbling and shrieking<\/a> about a sound of victory and angels from Africa. She spoke in tongues, horribly. I remembered every cruel, deranged and disingenuous prayer I\u2019d ever heard offered, in the Charismatic Renewal<\/a>, and shuddered, but I also laughed. It was all so patently ridiculous. Everything I\u2019d feared for so long was so clearly not of God. There was nothing of charity or justice or compassion, nothing of Christ, in this, just a false prophet babbling nonsense.<\/p>\n

We waited again.<\/p>\n

We watched and mocked the video of those MAGA-hat-wearing women praying outside of the convention center. They said they were praying for \u201cjustice\u201d but they didn\u2019t look like they were. They were bowing and kneeling and prostrating before the door of the convention center, exactly like the Israelites bowing to the golden calf in every portrayal of that scene I\u2019ve been shown since I was a little girl. They were worshipping their idol.<\/p>\n

A personality cult for a politician is idolatry, and a sin.<\/p>\n

It would be a sin if I carried on about Biden the way they\u2019re doing about Trump, and I refuse to do so. Biden is not God or God\u2019s Anointed either. He is a deeply flawed politician with ideas that are not adequate. Biden\u2019s position on race and police brutality isn\u2019t adequate. His position on the environment isn\u2019t adequate. His position on economics isn\u2019t adequate. I disagree with him completely on other things. But he\u2019s not the butt end of the moral compass the way Trump is. Trump massively jacked up<\/a> the abortion rates<\/a> during his term. He deliberately downplayed a pandemic, resulting in the deaths of a quarter of a million Americans. He drove white supremacists out of hiding and gleefully made wealth inequality so much worse. He tortured immigrants to make an example of them. I voted for Biden with a clean conscience. But Biden is not a messiah.<\/p>\n

Still, Trump\u2019s lying rant made it clear that if Biden wasn\u2019t elected, America would be stuck with a full-blown fascist at the helm with nothing left to lose. I don\u2019t think we could recover from four more years.<\/p>\n

We were never great, but we had the potential to be so much worse, and we still might be.<\/p>\n

We waited.<\/p>\n

I personally stayed up until three o\u2019clock in the morning, waiting.<\/p>\n

I decided to lie down and close my eyes for a minute, and when I opened them it was daylight.<\/p>\n

I came down just after the count had flipped Georgia to blue by the tiniest margin, thanks for the most part to the effort of Stacey Abrams<\/a>. And then Pennsylvania flipped, and the people in Philadelphia were dancing in the streets. Pennsylvania flipped so thoroughly that it\u2019s being reported Trump can\u2019t win his lawsuit: none of the ballots counted so far include those mailed on election day but received afterward. These are all votes received on the third<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I felt muscles unclenching that I hadn\u2019t realized I clenched in 2016.<\/p>\n

Is it over?<\/p>\n

No. We don\u2019t know what Trump and his supporters will pull next.<\/p>\n

But this part is over, and Trump lost.<\/p>\n

We have the same people to thank that we always have to thank, whenever America manages to do something truly great: the people of color in Georgia and Wisconsin and in Philadelphia and in Detroit, their tireless organizing, their determination, doing what they ought to have done when the white voters didn\u2019t show up as they\u2019d been expected to do. They\u2019re the ones who dragged America to safety.<\/p>\n

They are always dragging America to safety.<\/p>\n

I live in a country guilty of more sins than I can name<\/a>. But I also live in a country where marginalized Americans have time and again stood up and called America\u2019s bluff. They\u2019ve looked at the words \u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>And they\u2019ve demanded that for themselves, knowing full well that\u2019s not what America meant. They\u2019ve fought and struggled and bled and died, and every time America has been anything close to admirable, it\u2019s because of them.<\/p>\n

I can be proud of my country for that.<\/p>\n

I can be just a little proud of my country, for the first time in about five years.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re so far from safe, I know. None of the problems we had before have gone away. But for the moment, I feel more relief than I have in years. We managed to elect the flawed man instead of the golden calf. The centrist won instead of the fascist.<\/p>\n

This impossibly long Tuesday is finally over.<\/p>\n

Now we can get to work.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 I still didn\u2019t feel very well. I was sitting up awake on the third night, the third long dark night of a neverending Tuesday that started on Election Day. We all knew it would take this long, but it was still agony to live through it. I don\u2019t have to tell anybody this. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2694,"featured_media":13079,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1738,485,518,897,5192,1731,5953,665,1111,2146,1763,284],"tags":[34,537,12262,1716,2712,12265,1882,11929,7738,12256,12253,12259,12250],"class_list":["post-13712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","category-conscience","category-cop-on-black-violence","category-cry-of-the-poor","category-culture","category-donald-trump","category-environment","category-fear","category-feminism","category-human-dignity","category-idol","category-news","tag-abortion","tag-america","tag-counts","tag-donald-trump","tag-environment","tag-fascism","tag-georgia","tag-joe-biden","tag-maga","tag-people-of-color","tag-philadelphia","tag-relief","tag-votes"],"yoast_head":"\nTuesday is Finally Over<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  I still didn't feel very well. 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